Victims Are Our New Heroes
Not so long ago, the way you became a hero was, well, by acting heroically. That meant going above and beyond your normal civic duty or the requirements of your job and usually putting yourself at risk.
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But today the surer (not to mention safer) path to heroism is victimhood.
.. Consider our victim-hero de jour, Pfc. Jessica Lynch... But first reports were false. Lynch never fired a shot, she admitted, because her rifle jammed. Like apparently most members of her unit, she had failed to keep her weapon clean... I do a column stripping people of their victimhood. That includes the parents of autistic children who blame vaccinations for the disorder; Vietnam veterans who insist all of their ills.. sufferers of so-called “Gulf War Syndrome.”When I ask them to fax me medical records they hiss and spit and call me names not fit to print in a family newspaper, but nobody has ever taken me up on my challenge.Yet it’s worse than that. I’m convinced that most of these people never served in Vietnam or the Gulf at all. It’s a dead giveaway when they won’t even provide their unit names.
.. Somewhere buried in the penumbra of the Constitution there simply must be a right to victimhood. I’m a victim; I’m a Jew. I’m a victim; I’m a woman. I’m a victim; I’m black. I’m a victim; I’m gay. I’m a victim; I’m a straight white gentile male. And so Lynch is now rubbing elbows with Britney Spears and is a motivational speaker on the subject of “survival,” as if you can get an entire talk out of “be knocked unconscious.” Yet there were real heroes in her unit. They maintained their weapons and used them in defense of Lynch and the others, thus drawing deadly enemy fire to themselves.